Thanks again for the link - here's an update of what all I've done as well:

Extracted audstub.sys (drives the codecs) from driver.cab on winxp cd and replaced the existing one on my hd. - no luck.

Ran DXDiag and retested everything. - all working properly, so no luck there either.

I'm still getting these green people when I playback this (and any other) known good vid.
I think I'm going to try uninstall/reinstall winmediaplayer next and see if that works. I'll edit here and let yas know.

[edit]Grrr. No luck. I think windows lied to me when I tried to uninstall though - here's the steps I took:

Start>control panel>add/remove programs>add/remove windows components> uncheck win media player > click ok. The little wizard went through it's bullshit and returned me to whence I began. I then reinstalled using the same procedure, and got the same bullshit. My XP cd was in the cd-rom when all this took place and it didn't access it at all, so I don't think it uninstalled, just made it 'disappear'... any other suggestions on how to do this?[/edit]

[moreedit]Ok, so I get pissed off at the whole thing, download a clean copy of windows media player 10 from Microsoft, and go through reinstall. I'm pretty sure it overwrote the files this time.

No fix - the people are still green... grr. [/moreedit]